Trade And Employment

An International Labor Office and European Commission publication Although the effect of trade on employment is a popular point of economic debate, there are very few factual assessments available. This book examines the most recent evidence and provides guidance for the design of tools to assess more accurately the employment impacts of trade. Trade and Employment argues for strengthening the micro-foundations of models used to evaluate the employment effects of trade and for including the informal economy and adjustment processes in modeling efforts. It emphasizes the role of governments in helping firms survive or grow, in providing social protection to protect against external shocks, in addressing gender equity, and in building physical infrastructure and human skills bases that facilitate export diversification. It is a valuable resource for all those interested in the debate on the employment effects of trade: workers and employers, academics and policymakers, and trade and labor specialists.

Recent years have witnessed growing concern over the controversial issue of trade and labour standards. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of these questions and reviews evidence for a large number of countries throughout the world.

The book provides theoretical and empirical evidence on how world trade evolves, how trade affects resource allocation, how trade competition affects productivity, how China shock affects world trade and how trade affects large and small countries. It is a useful reference which focuses on new approaches to international trade by looking into country-specific as well as firm-product level-specific cases.

Annotation Kletzer attempts to heighten our understanding of the labor market costs of freer trade. While economy-wide net benefits may ensue from lossening trade policies, such policies do not proclude localized net losses. This book aims to measure some of these losses in the hope that future policy making will address them and the people who bear the burdon.

Launched and co-ordinated by the OECD, the International Collaborative Initiative on Trade and Employment (ICITE) is a two-year old joint undertaking of ten international organisations. This book brings together some of the results of ICITE's research.

This volume investigates the links between employment, trade and structural transformation. In the context of global rebalancing, accompanied by inevitable changes in trade patterns between Asia and the rest of the world, the volume's chapters analyze the links between trade openness and trends in employment and its quality. Specifically, through Asian case studies (both analytical and econometric), the volume examines how trade and export-led growth models have led to specialization and evolving demands on various types of labor. The rapidly changing labor market contours in developing Asia during this era of globalization, along with the new context resulting from the recent global financial crisis and new insights from theoretical literature, have led to the need for such studies. This volume helps fill this gap in the literature.

"The substantial literature investigating the links between trade, trade policy, and labor market outcomes-both returns to labor and employment-has generated a number of stylized facts, but many open questions remain. This paper surveys the subset of the literature focusing on trade policy and integration into the world economy. Although in the longer run trade opportunities can have a major impact in creating more productive and higher paying jobs, this literature tends to take employment as given. A common finding is that much of the shorter run impacts of trade and reforms involve reallocation of labor or wage impacts within sectors. This reflects a pattern of expansion of more productive firms-especially export-oriented or suppliers to exporters-and contraction and adjustment of less productive enterprises in sectors that become subject to greater import competition. Wage responses to trade and trade reforms are generally greater than employment impacts, but trade can only explain a small fraction of the general increase in wage inequality observed in both industrial and developing countries in recent decades. A feature of the literature survey is that the focus is almost exclusively on industries producing goods. Given the importance of service industries as a source of employment and determinants of competitiveness, the paper argues that one priority area for future research is to study the employment effects of services trade and investment reforms. "--World Bank web site.